Blue-eyed boy meets brown-eyed girl. He thanks the good Lord that he did. This is a story of truly “better together” than apart. But let’s start at the beginning:

My mother and father passed on to me great faith in Jesus, humor (especially at one’s own expense), and the idea that mission is something to give your life for.

They also gave me people skills. This isn’t to say that I’m on the extreme end of extroversion; personality tests put me just about the middle and even leaning a bit toward introversion. Translation: I was a goofy yet compliant kid. I could get silly but would fall in line when someone’s authority was activated — that is, if they get my head out of the clouds. (I’m not known as the fastest person.) I think the best word I’ve come across to describe my general state of mind is contented — “happy and at ease” says the dictionary. Troubles would cloud my mind from time to time but would usually pass like a fast-moving storm.

I think I began making a career of combining my faith and social skills in ninth grade when I started acting like a slow-motion bird to a Beatles song at a year-end school dance. Soon I had about 10 fellow students following my lead and others asking who I was. In that moment, I realized the power of a little self-deprecation and stepping just a bit outside the norm. In high school, people were often surprised that I wasn’t a partier but just “high on life” and very active in my youth group, which grew quite large and had an influence in the school during that time. I got “youth group famous” with absurd skits and weekend retreat or state convention shenanigans, but I would also have excellent conversations at school with nonchurched students who seemed interested in this kid who took his faith, but not himself, seriously.

God only increases our responsibility and the things and people we must steward as we grow in Him.

In college at West Virginia University, I was Mr. Ministry — involved in just about every large-group college ministry and Bible study available. I helped launch a new Sunday evening college worship service my junior year. During my senior year, our service moved to campus on Sunday mornings, and I was highly involved in that exciting endeavor. In fact, I loved what I was doing in ministry so much that it was hard to finish school — I nearly didn’t! I ended up having to go an extra semester…which was providential because that was Sarah’s first semester of college.

I had already started an internship with Reliant at that time because it just made sense. One of my mentors was a Reliant missionary and could see my drive and the Lord’s leading. He said all I needed was some training in support raising. I continued working in partnership with the church that launched the campus worship service. I led the musical elements of worship (we had a full rock band!) and facilitated a Bible study and a guys discipleship group. At the beginning of that fateful extra semester at the midweek Bible study where I was leading acoustic worship, Sarah, a bright-eyed freshman, came in…and the rest is history. The connection was immediate, and by the time I finally asked her to be my girlfriend at the start of the spring semester, our friends were wondering what took me so long. (I told you I was slow…)

There are so many stories in the intervening years (almost a decade and a half!) that are impossible to sum up, but suffice it to say that a deep, appreciative love for Sarah and how she’s many things I’m not (compassionate, self-sacrificial, long-suffering, organized, practical, efficient, and so many more) has grown and been refined by the fire of many trials and has transformed into something much greater than mere romance (as wonderful as romance is).

It’s a side-by-side marital covenant to prepare each other, our kids, and anyone the Lord gives us for that moment when each will stand before Him on the day of judgment. Francis and Lisa Chan speak of anticipating and envisioning this moment in their book You and Me Forever: Marriage in Light of Eternity. What will we have done for our loved ones when this appointed time arrives?

Seeing our marriage as a partnership in this mission changes everything. As much as I cherish those early years of faith in high school and college and my early twenties, and as much as everything is a process and lessons have to be learned sequentially, I realize more and more now that, as my current ministry supervisor says, God only increases our responsibility and the things and people we must steward as we grow in Him.

It’s with that growing sense of what He wants to use us to accomplish that we took the largest leap of faith of our lives and moved away from our home state of West Virginia and the college ministry life that we knew and joined the efforts of a fledgling nonprofit in Asheville, N.C., seeking to provide safe families for victims of sex trafficking. I would never have been brave enough for something like this without Sarah wholly by my side, walking step by step together on such a narrow and winding path. I would have stayed up front with the music and humor; she has taught me how to go behind the scenes and really serve. I also would never have been able to do it without Reliant providing the same amazing service they have all these years, to set me and Sarah up to be fully supported to fully partner without costing the nonprofit a dime.

Even better than self-deprecation is self-forgetting. We want ourselves to diminish as we lift up young women and children who have been forgotten and thrown aside. We want the power of the individual to fade into the greater power of the family and community and kingdom of God. God truly crafted us to be “better together,” and we will experience so much more peace, purpose, and true “contentedness” when we work to build environments where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This is the true definition of not taking yourself seriously but taking the community and mission of Christ very seriously.

This is what Sarah first planted, Reliant watered, and God brought into fruition and growth.